Can EV Batteries Be Recycled? It’s Complicated, But It’s Already Happening

Gsus4@lemmy.one to Technology@lemmy.world – 31 points – Can EV Batteries Be Recycled? It’s Complicated, But It’s Already Happening
motortrend.com

This is the big snag with EVs (as with solar panels and wind turbines): how much does a battery really cost if you factor in recycling and environmental damages? (Sorry about the slideshow format.)

17

i want to see them transferred to fixed energy storage (ie, home power walls). they are no longer fit for a car, and the huge power draw required, but when you move that to a home, the capacity and power draw is miniscule.

i would love to see a company put that together, and have something like a rack mount, which will take in various batteries and gets them to be "hot swappable"

reuse, before recycle

i've seen some ex-nissan leaf battery packs get turned into DIY solar power storage for home use (on youtube), but it looks super complicated & not really doable for most people.

full on recycling, breaking down to chemicals/metals and then reselling back to battery manufacturing companies is far more realistic for most EV batteries. it can be a dirty process though.

yeah, there are a lot of options to do it.

The most common i have seen is getting the packs to a standard low voltage (typically 48V), then using a LV compatible hybrid inverter/charger.

What i meant was not DIY, but a company to set up a set of modules that easily plug in together, and sell them to the public.

oh, those exist - not made from recycled materials, or I really doubt it, but ---> https://us.ecoflow.com/products/5kwh-power-kits?variant=39946322313289

the batteries are modular & stack together well. I was looking into "easy" systems a while back and stumbled on these. it's over priced, for what you get, but it's easy to set up.

yeah there are a number of stackable kits around. but no, they would be new batteries.

check out https://batteryhookup.com/ they always have recovered cells. look at these:

i could do it, but the shipping to Australia is prohibitive. I am certain that they could do something, based off of a number of different module types from different EV manufacturers (Tesla, BYD, Nissan, etc), and build out a framework that can stack them together using as common as possible materials to make it lego-like.

anyway, thats the dream!

thanks for the link!

that looks super DIY though... having to get the BMS, and then wiring it up properly is beyond my skills, I'll probably go with a server rack battery that has the BMS other nice features built in.

yes. i agree.

What i am saying, as for reuse, i want a company to start up that builds and sells the reuseable EV batteries as home storage. no need for us to get our hands dirty, or even know what BMS is.

Correct about the reduce and reuse before recycling.

But there is one thing to consider: does recharging efficiency also go down with battery lifecycles? Because that is the main factor in determining whether you should reuse it or not.

I had this impression that the microscopic flaws that cause reductions to capacity also produce waste heat (and from real life dealing with old phone batteries that take forever and heat up when recharging), which you don't want or at least need to calculate a break-even point when recharging efficiency is low enough to send to recycle.

good question.

I think that you will find that vehicle batteries become unsuitable for locomotion far quicker than a phone battery becomes unsuitable for a phone. But i dont have any real proof.

I will note, that there are a bunch of written-off cars that have their batteries on the second hand market, that is another avenue for re-using batteries.

I know someone who wanted to make a recycling startup for the batteries (pick the cells that are still ok and assemble new batteries out of them), but there’s so much red tape in my country for that (needs to request a recycling permission with a lot of requirements) that he just gave up.